Major websites including Amazon, The Guardian, CNN, Reddit down
A global internet outage (now resolved) was reported by several internet users around 3 PM Indian Standard Time. The disruption has affected a number of websites including news portals such as CNN, The New York Times, and The Guardian in addition to platforms such as Reddit. The disruption could be attributed to US-based cloud computing services provider Fastly experiencing technical difficulties with its services.
Fastly, the CDN provider, is having a massive outage, resulting in Twitch, Pinterest, Reddit, The Guardian, and the FT returning 503 errors.https://t.co/parKGKwrSU
— Matt 'TK' Taylor (@MattieTK) June 8, 2021
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a system consisting of clusters of data centers and proxy servers spread across the world to serve content faster. The distributed system hosts cached versions of websites across multiple locations, which reduces the physical distance between servers and users. This minimizes the server hops and allows website content to be served with minimal delay irrespective of users' location.
Fastly is a cloud-based content delivery network, which handles an important aspect of internet infrastructure for its client websites. The company has confirmed that it is facing downtime affecting a wide swath of its services. Many of the affected websites have been using Fastly for the deployment of their content delivery infrastructure. Fastly is currently working on resolving the critical issues crippling many websites.
Later, Fastly's service status tracker reported that it had identified the issue at 4:14 PM IST, approximately 45 minutes after it investigated the outage. Another 15 minutes later, a fix was successfully applied. Sure enough, several platforms such as Reddit, CNN, and the UK government website are slowly limping back to normalcy. However, elevated origin loads is causing performance issues as of this writing.
Independent internet tracking platforms such as Downdetector were able to confirm that virtually all affected websites had come online at the same time, which gives further credence to the theory that the outage was isolated to websites using Fastly's content delivery services. Meanwhile, tech news platform The Verge, which was also affected, resorted to relaying news about the outage through a Google Docs page.
